The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers involved in theconstruction and application of electronic dictionaries to discussmodifications of existing resources in line with the users' needs, therebyfully exploiting the advantages of the digital form. Given the breadth ofthe questions, we welcome reports on work from many perspectives, includingbut not limited to: computational lexicography, psycholinguistics,cognitive psychology, language learning and ergonomics.

Motivation:

The way we look at dictionaries (their creation and use) has changeddramatically over the past 30 years. While being considered as an appendixto grammar in the past, by now they have moved to centre stage. Indeed,there is hardly any task in NLP which can be conducted without them. Also,rather than being static entities (data-base view), dictionaries are nowviewed as dynamic networks, i.e. graphs, whose nodes and links (connectionstrengths) may change over time. Interestingly, properties concerningtopology, clustering and evolution known from other disciplines (society,economy, human brain) also apply to dictionaries: everything is linked,hence accessible, and everything is evolving. Given these similarities, onemay wonder what we can learn from these disciplines.

In this 4th edition of the CogALex workshop we therefore also invitescientists working in these fields, with the goal to broaden the picture,i.e. to gain a better understanding concerning the mental lexicon and tointegrate these findings into our dictionaries in order to supportnavigation. Given recent advances in neurosciences, it appears timely toseek inspiration from neuroscientists studying the human brain. There isalso a lot to be learned from other fields studying graphs and networks,even if their object of study is something else than language, for examplebiology, economy or society.

Topics of Interest:

This workshop is about possible enhancements of lexical resources andelectronic dictionaries. To perform the groundwork for the next generationof such resources we invite researchers involved in the building of suchtools. The idea is to discuss modifications of existing resources by takingthe users' needs and knowledge states into account, and to capitalize onthe advantages of the digital media.